...Plethora Group...
a syndicate of Big Blue Turtle, Inc.
Hi There! Welcome to Plethora Group. Plethora Group is the culmination of several hundred ideas, several thousand proposals and several million drawing board sketches. It all started back in 1999, (remember the days of All Advantage and iWon) when I was in my high school library thinking about how I was going to be the internet's next pioneer. Did I have a path to where I was headed, not exactly? Did I have any formal web training, very little. So what's some 17 year old punk got going for him during his last brutal year of high school? The art of sales. I'm not saying I could millions of dollars worth of software, but I was able to sell a teacher on the difference between a B and a C. This is why I had so much library time.
At the time, I was one of the leading affiliates of All Advantage, and started googling other similar programs and found that there were entire networks dedicated to affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing in short is the sale of a brand name retail item, through an advertisement on your web site. For example you'll see that we may have ads from Dell or Apple on here, and when users click the link and make a purchase we generate a commission (generally 2-3% of the sale). The first network we teamed up with was Linkshare, then Commission Junction (better known as CJ.com these days) and then eventually ShareASale.com and a few other networks. We still have our memberships in place with a Canadian firm called Neverblue andan American firm called Leadpoint. Visitors will see small ads dedicated to those firms throughout our site.
If we fast forward through my college years (ahhhh the parties, frat houses and rugby weekends) we'll come to a pretty vivid evening in the summer of 2004. I was sitting on laptop, bored, and talking to Shaun (my soon to be Venture partner) about a great name to take the ".com" world by storm. After discussing things with him for about an hour we were stuck on the word "turtle", but things like turtle.com and turtleshell.com were both taken. So we asked ourselves, what could possibly be unique in one sense yet carry with it an implied foundation of presence? Why not use "Big Blue" in front of it. Neither of us were really New York Giants fans but they always did have an intimidating D-Line when we were growing up, so it kinda stuck. In August 2004, Big Blue Turtle was born in concept. It would be almost another three and a half years before it took on a broader web presence with business cards, t-shirts and stickers.
2006 is when things started to take shape and a new product was introduced to the team at Big Blue Turtle (BBT), the mortgage lead. Initially available to affiliates of the CJ network through Lower My Bills, the mortgage lead was the hottest commodity in the marketplace given that mortgage brokers were paying as much as $150 a lead (and some still do). At that point we hooked up with Leadpoint and were able to provide customers and home owners the ability to provide their info for mortgage brokers and mortgage companies to contact them if they were meeting certain criteria. Big Blue Turtle capitalized on this and very quickly revenues were being generated and things were looking awesome, until well the market hit a brick wall about 12 months later. Smaller firms like Big Blue Turtle went from murderer's row to skid row. Days when 15-20-25 leads were a good day, you were lucky to get 2-3 or 4 leads. The price points dropped, people started to fear the banking system and brokers were considered evil.
Big Blue Turtle, needed to think of something and think of it quick. The goverment was interacting with the banks, but the money wasn't going to where it should. Every industry needed security and every company needed other outlets and other streams of revenue or potential revenue. With that being said, Big Blue Turtle grew up in a sense and incorporated in New York State in mid-2008. Now formally known as Big Blue Turtle, Inc., BBT could hook-up with larger components of the financial services industry, and that they did.
2009 has marked a year of enormus progress for BBT. It started with a bump in the road, when BBT initiated talks with TMP, a financial services sub agent. Things hadn't gone very far and work completed wasn't going to be paid on. That led BBT to review other affiliations. The first of those affiliations was with North American Bancard a credit card processing provider who also offers Merchant Cash Advance programs. Following the North American Bancard talks, Big Blue Turtle formed a syndicate Plethora Group whose sole purpose was to focus on financial services. Plethora Group, on its own, formed partnerships with both Midtown Credit, Inc. (Hackensack, NJ) and All State Home Equity (Baldwin, NY) to provide corporate consulting, residential mortgage loans (to residents of NY, CT and FL) and factoring solutions to companies in and around the logistics industry. Over the next two years Plethora Group intends to reach out into the mining & natural resources industry as well as gaming & entertainment industries.
-Matt Schilling
Founder & Managing Partner
October 2009
